Staring at God’s Pinky Toe: A Conversation with Joshilyn Jackson

New York Times Bestselling novelist Joshilyn Jackson is the author of seven novels and a novella: The Opposite of Everyone, Someone Else’s Love Story, gods in Alabama, Between, Georgia, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, Backseat Saints, A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty, and the novella My Own Miraculous. Her books have been translated into a dozen languages, won SIBA’s novel of the year, three times been a #1 Book Sense Pick, twice won Georgia Author of the Year, and three times been shortlisted for the Townsend prize. She serves on the board of Reforming Arts, a nonprofit dedicated to providing theatre infused liberal arts education to women who are under carceral control in Georgia. Through their education-in-prison and reentry programs, Reforming Arts fosters the development of critical and creative thinking skills, encouraging students to build livable lives.

E. Wilson Young graduated from UGA with an English degree and, after receiving more MFA rejection letters than schools he applied to, wound up in Atlanta, where he has become a fixture of the live lit/storytelling scene. His work has appeared in Opium Magazine, Defenestration Magazine, and The Higgs Weldon. He currently serves as Creative Nonfiction Editor for Emrys Journal. Time permitting, he has adventures and throws parties, two endeavors that usually end well.

E. Wilson Young: You’ve said that while “the Christian fiction people wouldn’t touch one of my books with someone else’s twenty-foot-pole,” you absolutely considered your novels to be Christian fiction. Have you noticed any softening of that attitude through your career? Did that tacit judgment ever bother you?

Joshilyn Jackson: Nope, no softening. Maybe the opposite of softening, right now. To be clear, though, when I say, “Christian fiction won’t touch my work,” I mean CBA (Christian Booksellers Association), and it doesn’t bother me. I wouldn’t expect CBA to bend to what I am doing any more than I would expect TOR to publish me and say, “It’s sci-fi, sans space or aliens or tech. Not even physics, except the characters obey the laws of them.”

CBA books are unified mostly by what they do not contain — cussing, explicit sex, explicit violence. They also need a clear, evangelical message, sometimes even a moral. It’s not anything I am interested in doing.

I write about poverty, exploitation, how we treat The Other, and what forms identity, because these things are central to my faith. It takes me to some gritty places, and the kinds of characters that attract me would never say, “Oh, shucksy-darn, let’s not have weird intercourse or shoot anyone.”

I am very interested in the ugly dynamics that fuse and confuse power and sex and also in the aftermath of violence, so being explicit is sometimes important. I write about these things in attempts to understand the mechanics of grace. I want to see what redemption looks like in this fractured, messy, brutal world. So, yeah. I am not writing CBA books, but I am a Christian writer.

Also, and maybe this is not specifically Christian — religious, let’s say — my characters engage with God or with the idea of God. Many of them pray. Prayer is like going to the bathroom; you rarely see anyone fictional doing it. My characters either have a spiritual life or they consciously reject having a spiritual life for reasons that the book explores. I think humans are threefold creatures, trinities ourselves — mind, body, spirit. I enjoy and try to write books whose characters are trinities.

That said, I try very hard not to be gratuitous. If I put the image or the word in, I need it for some larger reason — to build character or sense of place or create voice or speak to theme. My characters live messy lives, because they are broken, but then, I think everyone is broken.

I want the church to be a haven for all of us broken people, not some false place of safety where the “changed and saved” can escape from the riffraff. I realize I am being highly critical of the church, both here and in my novels. But I get to be. I am in the church. I am of the church. I love the church. Therefore I am entitled to explore the places where it — where we — are failing. And right now? In many ways, we are failing.

EWY: In The Opposite of Everyone, there’s a lot of imagery from Hindu mythology, and you’ve talked about Paula as Kali. Likewise, in Someone Else’s Love Story you characterize Paula as an avenger, as someone who always sticks up for the weaker party. What interested you in Hinduism and those associations? Was that Hindu element part of Paula’s character from the start?

JJ: It was not in Paula at the start. Paula was a minor character in Someone Else’s Love Story. I was so fascinated by her toughness, her loyalty, her fearlessness — she has that kind of bravery that lets her double down. She kept taking over the book. I had to go back into every scene with Paula in it and pull out thousands of words, shove her sideways. Oh, but she was hard to shove. I knew she would demand her own book, so I stared writing it.

That first draft was quite different from the finished product — very. There was no Birdwine, no Candace, no Joya. The plot centered on Julian, who was at that point a Juliette, and a murder case that Paula took on pro bono. I got thirty thousand words in, and it wasn’t going well. Her voice and her choices were hard for me to find or understand. I am so conflict averse, and as a Southern woman, I was practically raised to be passive-aggressive. Paula is the opposite of me.

I was taking Yoga from a woman named Astrid Santana. (Name your kid that, I dare you. She will be a yoga teacher. If you are lucky, she will also be as kind and good to people as Astrid.) She would tell stories from the Ramayana or Hindu god stories before class. I loved the stories, so I started reading — and then I realized Paula was Kali. She was an incarnation of Kali. This understanding opened her up for me in whole new ways. I threw out the book I was writing and started fresh, with Kali stories as my jumping off point.

EWY: A pastor of mine used the phrase “spiritual learning curve” to mean how we grow both in faith and in how we relate to other people. Did including Hindu elements in your new novel accompany a deepening of your own faith and spiritual growth?

JJ: Story is how I explain the world to myself, so I am sure in some ways that’s true. My idea of spiritual growth is trying to move God into a slightly larger box than the current one I’ve jammed God into. I’m never going to be able to unbox God, no human can, but it seems worthwhile to work to let God be a little bigger. I am pretty sure I am staring intently at a fraction of God’s pinky toe, and even that toe molecule must be pretty compressed in the box I have for it.

EWY: Your novels make great use of mystery and secrets and undiscovered pasts. The character who comes the closest to already knowing everything is Florence in gods in Alabama. Even when Arlene thinks she and Clarice have pulled one over on Florence in sneaking out of the house, it turns out Florence already knew. The way Florence suffers mild blasphemies of her almost omnipresent authority and yet is also swift to righteous anger makes her seem like she is the god in Alabama, or at least is a personification or caricature of the (stereo)typical Southern Baptist God. You’ve talked about your slow return to the Baptist Church. With that in mind, was Florence an exorcism of that toxic Southern Baptist God you grew up with? Do you think you needed to write her in order to be receptive to a return to the Baptist faith?

JJ: I was actually raised in The Church of Christ, which is much like the Baptist church if those Baptists weren’t so dern liberal. *rimshot* My maternal grandfather was a Baptist preacher of the hellfire and brimstone variety, though, so I was definitely raised Baptist adjacent. To say that I am shocked to find myself at a Baptist church is an understatement.

When we moved here, my daughter was a fourth grader, and we had two weeks of summer left. She was so bored and lonely, out of school in a new place. I looked around for a Vacation Bible School — like camp but free! — and the Baptists down the street had the only one left. I was hesitant, but I thought, “Well, what can they possibly do to ruin her in a week?”

So I signed her up, and she fell in love with this church. She is — and was — an astute little person, and she kept saying, Oh, this is our church, this is our church! And I would look at the B word on the sign, and say, No, it surely is not.

She got very frustrated with me and said, You and Dad are dragging us every week to different churches, any church you want, and you won’t even visit my pick once? Well, she had us. So we visited. Holding our collective marital nose.

We never left. We were home.

I am a Big Tent person, attracted to churches that bring people together who would otherwise never meet. I always want to pull more and more chairs up and seat even people who disagree with me, even people with ideologies that make me quail. I want to break bread with them, and I want us try to change each other’s hearts for the better, because I am sure I make multitudes quail for different reasons. We stuck at this church because it is all kinds of diverse — racially, socioeconomically, in age range, in sexual orientation — but right now I am proudest of the fact that we are politically diverse, even though this is currently so uncomfortable it presses the breath out of me. That discomfort matters. I tend to think if you are very comfortable at church, you are probably at the wrong church.

I have to remember that Jesus loves people who drive me to rage and despair. I have to try to love them, try to find a way to connect past our differences and find common ground, soften each other. This is so hard, especially right now — but it has to be done, or else love loses, and we can’t allow that.

EWY: I’ve noticed that in many of your novels, while revenge and the desire to redress personal wrongs are very present, the stories are at least equally about creation, about building that new family. The characters have concerns beyond a myopic fixation on revenge. That seems like a very Christian, turn-the-other-cheek attitude. How pivotal is that hopeful, redemptive element?

JJ: I write toward grace. Always. Grace is my True North, so, yes, there is always hope in my novels. I’m tired of nihilism. I’m bored of cynicism, which has become our cultural default setting. I don’t try for tidy or perfect, because it isn’t truthful, but I do try to find the hope. I believe in hope, and the older I get, the more I come to value simple sincerity. I try to find paths through dark places to some of those sweet, clean breaths life does actually give us.

One of my characters — Mosey, in A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty — comes to a moment of like this and she says, “I was smart enough to understand that this was only a pause. This was a heartbeat in between a shit storm passed over and a thousand more coming.” She is speaking for me, more directly than any other character before or since. I try to write my way to those heartbeats, though there are still and always storms on the horizon.

EWY: While watching the show Veronica Mars I became struck by how it felt like a YA version of a Joshilyn Jackson novel; a sexual violation alters the protagonist’s world and leads her to build a new family. Are you by any chance a fan of the show? And have you ever thought about writing a YA novel?

JJ: Huge fan. See also: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where I would say a variation on that storyline plays out. I also think those shows and my books lean into the same kind of gallows humor. Neither of those shows is funny. But the characters are funny. My characters — especially the narrators — do tend to be funny as well. I use humor as a coping mechanism, and so do many of the people I write. So do many of the people I know. It’s a great way to get through life. Much like life, readers will get through some very dark scenes if the narrator has a sharp sense of humor.

I am writing two YA novels, actually. One is drafted but needs a lot of work. It’s a coming of age book set in the 90’s in rural Alabama. One is a purely fun exercise — I doubt I will ever try to sell it. I work on it when I need to remember that writing is fun and joyful and more than just my job.

EWY: What inspired you to become involved in Reforming Arts, the liberal arts program for women in prison?

JJ: About four years ago, I saw a notice that was lurking in the announcements section of my church bulletin. It was no more than a sentence or two, saying that folks interested in prison ministry should meet that night at a nearby library. I had a huge swell of instant surety, and I turned to my husband and whispered, I have to go to this.

That’s odd for me. I am such a pragmatist. I don’t have “mysterious feelings” or intuitions. But this notice compelled me in a way that seemed like an actual call. “Calls” are not things pragmatists hear. Maybe because we don’t think they exist. We sure don’t listen for them.

This call was so loud, even I heard it. I had to go. Period. Of course, I immediately explained it away — found a way to rationally explain the compunction.

I’ve never been to prison, but I have deep connections to people who have. My dearest friend from childhood on served several years on drug charges. Another dear, dear girlhood friend fell into serious drug use and prostitution and then died in a shootout between the police and the man she called her boyfriend and I called her pimp.

Early on, I was running toward the edge of the world right alongside her, and at a certain point, before I was too deeply mired, I turned and went a different way. I had ropes around me, hauling me back, thrown by my parents, my brother, the man I called my best friend who eventually became my husband, a theatre professor. They hauled so hard they pulled me off my destructive course. My friend who died — she didn’t have a lot of ropes. Still, I am cognizant that it could be me in prison or dead. There is no such thing as The Other. It could be any of us, really. It could be you. What choices did you make, and what ropes were you born with? Believe me, it could be you.

I find the experience of teaching writing inside prison beautiful and terrible. I think my job there is simply to bring tools — writing materials, books — and then create space where incarcerated women can speak. Then I listen. It’s very empowering, to have room to tell your story, to edit it, to shape it. I am, after all, a redemption-obsessed novelist. I believe in the power of story. I believe that if you change your narrative, you can change your life.

Pieces from Emrys Journal v. 34 were recognized in both Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays. Buy the issue here.